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wherevenusholdssomeofficespace · 1 month

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Why the Llama Incident works

The noodle incident is a trope done in A LOT of shows (PNF has a whole TV tropes page dedicated to its noodle incidents). Technically getting disowned and raised by ocelots is a noodle incident in pnf... we never do know what gets him officially disowned and how he ends up in the care of the ocelots). The noodle incident is meant to just showcase that this character has a history of some sort.

Generally speaking, explaining a noodle incident is a bad idea because the unknown has infinite potential. The intrigue is part of what makes it interesting. People can come up with ideas that are absolutely out there themselves. Usually, coming up with something that will live up to the hype is impossible because the hype of the event has built it up to impossible levels.

Emphasis on the usually.

They literally called it a llama incident. They knew what a noodle incident was, and were purposefully playing with our expectations that it would be an unrevealed event. And, as I said before, PnF has already dealt with its fair share of noodle incidents that go unexplained.

And as a noodle incident it served its purpose. Generally a noodle incident will provide context on what the status quo is without spelling out the details. In Rollercoaster the Juggling Monkey's noodle incident tells us that this is not the first time Phineas and Ferb have had a Big Idea (in fact we never do get what Phineas and Ferb's first Big Idea was). In Milo Murphy's Law the Llama incident tells us that Milo and Melissa were getting into Murphy's Law shenanigans long before Zack came into the picture. Showing us that they're so familiar with each other that situations that might require more context to another person doesn't.

Now bear with me as I go on a bit of a tangent that I promise is related.

The main cast of Milo Murphy's Law is a trio, and one of its members is defined by being the new guy. Zack is kind of an audience surrogate. Melissa is Milo's childhood friend and Milo has lived with this all his life. Generally, they don't need to explain anything to each other, nor do they need to explain anything to their class who is already at least passingly familiar with Milo. But they do to Zack.

I don't necessarily think MML NEEDED the audience surrogate character per se. Quite frankly I think audience surrogate characters are rarely necessary. You can always just start with a group of friends and fill in context via implication. I think it's just significantly harder, because you run the risk of alienating your audience by not allowing them to get settled in what is going on or having your characters talk about things like they don't already know what is going on.

But I don't think its at all an inherently bad storytelling method. I personally find outsider POVs delightful, and a good audience surrogate character is an outsider POV, at least at the start. Zack being new to the whole Murphy's Law allowed him a story about choosing to engage with the hazardous kid, winning him loyal friends and a set of skills he never would have dreamed of before. We get to see him grow, and we wouldn't have seen that if he was Milo's friend the whole time.

On the other hand he also has a bit of a wild background, as the former lead singer of a locally famous lumberjack themed boy band. Which gives Milo and Melissa the chance to join a band. Or for Milo to have a real birthday party. A change in status quo provides opportunities for growth and change, for the whole cast, which is useful in more overarching stories... like MML. It's not NECESSARY of course. Zack could have been a classmate that had always kept his distance before he accidentally got tangled up with Milo and decided he was cool. But there's nothing wrong with him being straight up new either.

And at the most basic level, Zack's complete unfamiliarity provides a nice contrast to Melissa's familiarity and Milo's day to day life. Zack is starting from 0 while Milo has been dealing with this every single day of his life.

So Zack isn't going to know what the Llama Incident is. And while noodle incidents being unexplained is fun for the audience, it isn't going to be so fun for someone who is constantly living with people who know what this Llama Incident is. Of course they could have told Zack the noodle incident off screen, it would have made for a good gag to cut into the story with Melissa and Milo finishing telling Zack the story. But instead, we are treated to an episode that has Zack really beginning to slot into his life as Milo's friend.

Back to the main point.

MML is one of the only shows with enough sheer chaotic energy that it could actually pull off making a group of seemingly unrelated references into a cohesive genuinely interesting story. The whole show is things that could feasibly be noodle incidents, which makes it easy to get a baseline for what could have happened. Milo uses stuff in strange ways all the time, getting tangled up with weird animals and ending up in strange situations. There's no REAL reason to feel like we're missing out on too much. It sounds like a normal Milo situation, just with only him and Melissa... and the fact they keep bringing it up.

And really, if you think about it, its just Planned in Advance Meapless in Seattle. Meapless in Seattle was meant to be a bunch of unrelated clips meant to be a noodle incident of sorts. We wouldn't know what exactly would go down in that fake episode. But they managed to bring everything together into a really fun episode that made sense and honestly lived up to the hype. (At least for me). I mean. They somehow made it work. That's a feat in of itself.

The episode "Llama Incident" starts out implying a completely different noodle incident. We never learn how the kids end up on that branch. That's not important. That stuff happens all the time. Is the Llama Incident more interesting than the other stuff Milo gets into? Not particularly, but it DID involve him using more stuff he didn't normally use.

And the Llama Incident is told in the format of a story. Changing up the format of the episode is always a good way to make an episode feel fresh. I mean, look at The Remains of the Platypus. It's just an episode told backwards but its delightful chaotic fun. Or Delivery of Destiny. Really the only difference is the day follows the perspective of a delivery guy, but we get all our normal plot beats. But both are some of my favorite Phineas and Ferb episodes. If you remove their gimmicks they're pretty basic. Phineas and Ferb build a cheese themed amusement park, and Doofensmirtz's plan is only slightly more novel with brainwashing Perry. Phineas and Ferb building a ride and Doof juicing city hall are pretty typical of them, but Paul's semi-outsider POV (and being one of the closest characters we get to having the full picture of the story we the audience see), makes it feel fun and fresh. It makes the Llama Incident feel special. Even if it isn't my favorite unique episode format, it's still something fresh and fun.

So Milo and Melissa sort of tell the story a bit out of order, because they forget what pieces Zack would and wouldn't have context for or would or wouldn't find interesting. And, again, it's told as a story to Zack, so he asks questions. It's told while they are hanging from a branch, where they cut back to every once and a while to remind us that hey, the group is in the middle of a whole other Murphy's Law incident. We're getting two for one today.

But through the episode we get a bit of a Zack character arc. We've already established that Melissa and Milo are used to this, even if you weren't aware the way they were casually rating it at the beginning of the episode should tell you all you need to know. But Zack isn't completely used to this yet, so he's just nervous. He spends the episode using the story as a distraction, but being genuinely invested. In the end, the story acts as an inspiration to Zack, and he's able to help the group get out of the situation. AND for his trouble, he gets his own mysterious incident to reference. After half a season, he's truly part of the group now. He will continue to grow of course, trying to become braver and cleverer, and he's already made strides since the first episode. But even if Zack isn't really any less part of the group before or after its still a significant moment in Zack's character arc.

And then the Llama Incident comes back the next episode. The date was memorable to Milo, even throughout all of the other chaos in his life. And sometimes that's just how life is. And he uses his knowledge of the event, the way it stuck in his mind, to save him, Dakota and Cavendish from Pistachion's in Missing Milo. What we thought was going to just be a noodle incident, a running gag that functioned to establish just how used to this stuff Milo and Melissa were, turned out to be a plot point. To be fair we didn't NEED to know what the Llama incident was for Milo to choose to go there. We didn't need to know about the Llama Incident to know it was typical Murphy's Law shenanigans. It could have just been more out of context llama stuff. But now we the audience are in on the joke, so when Cavendish and Dakota express confusion, we can revel in the fact we know something they don't. Especially about two characters who themselves were slow revealing information about themselves to us... sure by that point we know their deal but at one point they were as mysterious and out of context to us as the Llama incident. And now we know what the Llama Incident is, and what their deal is.

The Woodpecker incident also is vaguely referred to later with the woodpecker whistle. We may not know the full story there, but it is still satisfying to see Milo's adventures giving him the skills and tools to deal with bigger, actually hostile, threats.

And at the end of the day, even if the Noodle Incidentness of the Llama Incident is ruined, it was immediately replaced with the Woodpecker incident. Which admittedly is never mentioned, but it doesn't need to be. The point of the Llama Incident was to draw attention to a specific incident to make a gag out of it. But they have incidents all the time. And we're privy to most of them. We sometimes get references to other incidents that we never fully get the context for. But we don't need context. We know how it'll go anyway because we have a whole show of effective noodle incidents.

#mml #milo murphy's law #zack underwood #I talk a lot about him specifically so he gets special mention

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